"A California civil liberties group launched a mobile application on Thursday that will let bystanders record cell phone videos of possible cases of police misconduct and then quickly save the footage to the organization's computer servers.

The California chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union said the app will send the video to the organization and preserve it even if a phone is seized by police or destroyed.

The launch of the ACLU's 'Mobile Justice CA' app comes as law enforcement agencies face scrutiny over the use of lethal force, especially against African-Americans, following several high-profile deaths of unarmed black men in encounters with police over the last year in the United States."

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"in March 1991, television screens across the world broadcast [George Holliday's] videotaped footage of LAPD officers raining down 56 baton blows on an African American named Rodney King. ... on April 29, 1992, a jury in Simi Valley, one of the whitest exurbs of Los Angeles, acquitted three of the four officers involved in beating Rodney King. The response in South Los Angeles was loud and immediate: That night, thousands of residents, black and Latino, took to the streets, starting a four–day riot that destroyed more than 1,000 buildings, injured 2,500 people, killed 58, and resulted in $1 billion in damage and 16,000 arrests."

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Bystandering As A Footing Position

"consider that much of talk takes place in the visual and aural range of persons who are not ratified participants and whose access to the encounter, however minimal, is itself perceivable by the official participants. These adventitious participants are 'bystanders.' Their presence should be considered the rule, not the exception. In some circumstances they can temporarily follow the talk, or catch bits and pieces of it, all without much effort or intent, becoming, thus, overhearers. In other circumstances they may surreptitious exploit the accessibility they find they have, thus qualified as eavesdroppers, here not dissimilar to those who secretly listen in on conversations electronically. Ordinarily, however, we bystanders politely disavail ourselves of these latter opportunities, practicing the situational ethic which obliges us to warn those who are, that they are, unknowingly accessible, obliging us also to enact a show of disinterest, and by disattending and withdrawing ecologically to minimise our actual access to the talk. (Much of the etiquette of bystanders can be generated from the basic understanding that they should act as to maximally encourage the fiction that they aren?t present; in brief, that the assumptions of the conversational paradigm are being realised.) But polite, bystanders will still be able to glean some information; from example, the language spoken, 'who' (whether in categorical or biographical terms) is in an encounter with whom, which of the participants is speaker and which are listeners, what the general mood of the conversational circle is, and so forth."
(Erving Goffman 1981)